


for the world's more full of weeping

by Kitty Eden (TheBigCat)



Series: unfold your own myth [1]
Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Animal Death, Bullying, Child Death, Children Being Horrible, Curses, Drowning, Fae & Fairies, Gen, Harm to Children, mild violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-15
Updated: 2020-05-15
Packaged: 2021-03-03 02:21:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24197395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheBigCat/pseuds/Kitty%20Eden
Summary: The Bushes have two daughters. All actions have consequences.Everything’sfine.
Series: unfold your own myth [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1746379
Comments: 4
Kudos: 6





	for the world's more full of weeping

**Author's Note:**

> [(x)](https://therogueofblood.tumblr.com/post/618178971767570432/for-the-worlds-more-full-of-weeping-thebigcat)
> 
> Title from ‘The Stolen Child’ by W. B. Yeats.

Picture the scene. It’s late July, the peak of summer, and Christine and Alan Bush are driving back from the hospital after the most stressful yet rewarding night of their lives. Christine is holding her newborn daughter in her arms in the back seat of the car, bouncing her gently and humming melodic nonsense. She’s exhausted and, quite simply, a complete wreck – but there’s a shine of absolute delight in her eyes, and anyone who knows her would say, quite definitively, that she’s the happiest she’s ever been in her life.

Anabel Claire Bush has barely been in this world for an entire day, and she is already so unbelievably loved. It’s been a long trip and a long night. Anabel’s room is ready, has been for weeks – months, even – painted with verdant green stripes floor-to-ceiling and full of pre-emptive baby gifts from friends and neighbours.

The car pulls up in the driveway of the Bush’s pleasant two-storey house, and Alan stops the car and grins over his shoulder at his wife, and she grins back at him, and he says, “Could you help me with some of the bags? I know you’ve just finished creating the miracle of life and all – ”

“Damn right I did,” says Christine, deliriously proud of herself even hours after the fact, and then adds, “but fine. And only because I love you.” She rests a sleeping Anabel gently on the back seat, and comes over to the back of the car to help bring everything they had brought back from the hospital into the house.

It’s impossible to say _when_ it happens, exactly – but the change is noticed ten minutes after Anabel is left alone.

“Chrissie,” says Alan, stopping dead in his tracks as he rounds the side of the car. “We have a problem.”

“Hm?” says Christine, having just dropped off the last load of bags on the front porch and only now coming around to join him – and then she sees the baby lying in the back of the car, wrapped in the hospital blanket that had been given to them, and she says, “ _oh,_ ” and then, “I _see,_ ” because it’s very, very clear that, despite the eyes and the face and the skin and the _everything_ being perfectly identical to Anabel’s, this is _not_ her. She barely hesitates. She scoops up the child in one arm and strides over to the front porch in three swift steps. With her free hand, she grabs the tiny clay pot of iron filings that’s been there ever since they arrived in Little Caldwell, and spins around – tossing the contents of it out into the garden in a wide, shining arc.

Immediately there’s a muffled yell and some silvery, delicate cursing, and a tall, spindly woman flickers into view – an identical child clutched to her chest. Her pale skin is blistering where the iron had made contact, and her curly dark hair is falling over her face in messy waves. She’s scowling and glaring, but not nearly as much as Christine and Alan are. Christine steps back towards the car – towards her husband, and stands beside him.

“Our daughter back, please,” Alan says.

“I took it,” says the fae woman, fingers curling around Anabel’s face. “And I gave you mine in return so, really, you’re not losing much. Forget about her.”

Christine gazes down at the changeling, and the child blinks back up at her with big brown eyes. She fumbles in the glovebox of the car for the lighter, seizes it with one hand, and whispers, “Sorry,” to the child, right before leaning down to kiss her on the forehead. At the same time, she flicks the lighter, causing it to spark with bright searing heat, and jabs it right into her arm.

The baby _wails,_ and the fae woman, apparently not having expected this, startles in alarm. Anabel spills out from her arms and falls, surprisingly lightly, to the ground, rolling over once before coming to rest, face half-pressed into the grass. The impact wakes her, and she starts crying too.

Even as Christine mutters apologies to the fairy child and presses kisses to the faint silvery mark that’s bloomed where the lighter touched her arm, Alan springs forward to scoop her human counterpart up from the dewy grass before the fae woman can retrieve her. He cradles her like she’s the most precious thing on Earth, because she very much is.

The fae woman is furious; looks like she wants to start flinging curses left right and centre, but a severance is a severance, and it’s not as if she can just rush forward and take the babies from them. Not when Christine still has a sprinkling of iron left in the pot and a lighter in one hand and this much righteous fury in her eyes.

“We’ll keep them both,” says Christine decisively, because she is a Bush and when a Bush sets their mind to something, there’s just about no force, earthly or otherwise, that can stop them from getting it done.

“You’ll do no such thing,” says the fae mother, holding herself tense and tight and angry. Her eyes are reflective and cat-like in the dim light. “The balance must be kept. I demand the child, or else I will _not_ be responsible for the consequences.”

“Damn the consequences!” exclaims Christine. “Any parent who’d abandon their baby girl for another without a moment’s thought is the furthest thing from a good mother, in my book. No, they’re both ours, and you can take your balance and shove it where –”

“I tell you again,” the fairy says. “I _will_ not be responsible for what occurs if you insist on maintaining your foolish decision. Really, I’m doing you a favour – your human child is sickly, _ill._ I doubt it’ll survive for long in this world. Take mine – she’ll serve you far better.”

Christine cradles her changeling child in her arms, and Alan holds their human child tight in his, and he says to the fairy mother, “You are not welcome in our house or our yard. Leave, or I’ll break out the cold iron.”

“You may have one year, and no more” says the fairy, and takes one step back. There is a dreadful crackling of ozone and lightning, despite the fact that it isn’t even remotely stormy tonight. A weight of oppressive finality falls over the Bush household. “One year, and if I don’t have one of them by then, I expect nature will take steps to balance itself by then.”

The air rends itself apart with an earth-shattering _crack,_ and then she’s gone. There’s a moment of silence as Christine struggles to breathe properly and get her heartrate under control so she doesn’t feel like she’s dying.

“Do you think we can pass them off as twins?” asks Alan Bush, looking just as discombobulated as she feels.

“I rather suppose we’ll have to,” says Christine Bush, now an unexpected mother of two – and smiles down at her new daughter.

Passing them off as twins, as it turns out, is simultaneously a lot easier and a lot harder than it seems. Anabel Claire Bush and Melanie Jane Bush are just about identical, if you ignore the shine to Melanie’s skin and the way that her ears are ever-so-slightly pointed, and the resemblance becomes even more uncanny as the two of them begin to grow. The same wild curly ginger hair, the same freckles that sprinkle wildly over pale skin.

Their parents quietly remove any traces of iron from the house; unravel all the fae-proof enchantments and charms and dispose of them equally as discreetly, buy piles upon piles of books on folklore and fairy tales so they know exactly what they’re getting themselves in for.

Not everyone in the town is happy about these decisions. In fact, most people in Little Caldwell live in constant wariness of their otherworldly neighbours, and are quite angry about it. The Bushes are cut out of contact lists and no longer quite so welcome at social gatherings, and if Melanie’s pointed ears are visible in public then she and her parents attract an unreasonable number of glares. The vast majority of the people of the town are furious about the Bush’s decision to take a fae child into their family – _willingly,_ no less – and really, it’s less of a question of if any one person supports them or not, and more a question of if they’re a vocal protestor or a quiet source of angry disapproval.

One year of nothing in particular happening. The Bush household has two beautiful baby girls in residence, and so what if one of them shatters a glass or six with a piercing scream during a particularly strenuous temper-tantrum? They’d always known raising children was going to be difficult. They’ll just need to up their game to match these new, unexpected challenges. So people glare and stare and mutter behind their backs – let them. It’s nice to have societal approval sometimes, but in no way is something like that necessary.

And in that one year, Ana and Mel are already on their way to becoming the sort of twins who are absolutely inseparable – synchronicity and borderline mind-reading and all, but – and you see, this is where the story begins to get nasty and more than a bit tragic, because after one year is when the incidents start.

At first it’s simple. Spoiled milk and mouldy bread, a few days earlier than it should happen. These are summarily thrown out and replaced, and when their shelf lives begin to grow uncomfortably short, rice and almond milk take up residence in the pantry and bread is forgone in its entirety.

A few weeks after this, the housecat dies – stiff and rigid and staring blankly at the sky on the back lawn, and Anabel is the one to find it during a crawling journey and even though she’s much too young to comprehend death at all, she wails like the world’s ending and until Melanie’s struggling to reach her and crying quite a bit herself.

And then in September, Anabel nearly drowns in her sleep, and suddenly everything seems a lot more urgent.

A slight leak in the roof of the girls’ shared room shouldn’t have caused this much of a problem. It certainly shouldn’t have let in enough water to completely soak Ana’s crib through and through, and Ana isn’t usually the sort of child who sleeps on her stomach, facedown, so it shouldn’t have been an issue at all. 

It’s Melanie’s yells and cries of horrified infant distress that wake their parents and alert them to the fact that Ana has stopped breathing entirely. Emergency panicked infant CPR is performed with increasing distress until Ana chokes out the last of the water from her tiny weak lungs and her parents are just about hysteric with relief.

It doesn’t miss their attention in the least that while Anabel’s crib and mattress had been drenched to the point of shallow pools of water forming, Melanie had remained perfectly and absolutely dry the whole time.

Month after month, it gets worse. A freak accident of a gas leak at ground level, where Anabel is playing, while Melanie busies herself on the couch with a brightly-colored picture book – Ana nearly chokes below. Spiders and other poisonous insects flock from their dark corners to menace Anabel Bush, and crows and other beady-eyed birds pluck at her hair and try to scratch her eyes until they’re all summarily shooed away by her parents.

It’s a miracle that she manages to survive to their third birthday, but survive she does – she has two eternally vigilant parents, and an equally eagle-eyed (if not even more so) twin sister who adores her more than life itself.

The increasing frequency of these near-death incidents aren’t lost on the other residents of Little Caldwell. They’d be rather hard to miss, after all. People talk, as people so often do, about curses and angering the Fair Folk and there is a rather disturbing increase in the amount of people who vocally and loudly advocate that Melanie should be taken back by the fae.

Her parents are not a fan of this. Neither is Ana, somehow. Even though she’s far too young to fully comprehend why everyone’s so opposed to her sister’s existence, that doesn’t stop her from climbing over to just about squish Mel flat whenever anyone starts muttering or glaring, as if trying to distract her from the cruel world surrounding her.

It’s unbearably sweet and unbearably sad in equal measure.

*

And then it’s July again. The girls’ respective fourth birthdays are coming up, it’s a perfect summer night, and Christine and Alan Bush make what they will later consider to be the worst mistake of their lives.

They’d only left the house for a short while. Barely even five minutes. Christine had stepped outside briefly, taking a break from preparing dinner to empty out their sorely neglected mailbox, and Alan had followed her with a laugh on his lips. As they go out, continuing their lighthearted conversation from the kitchen, the door shuts behind them with a click.

The girls are upstairs, running around and bumping into each other, and laughing about things that only they understand in that strange half-English twin language of theirs. There hasn’t been a leak in the roof or a creak in the floorboards or bugs in the cereal boxes for weeks on end now – and maybe that should have been a sign that they should all be more wary, but if it is, nobody notices it until it’s too late.

Christine Bush is gathering the mail up in one hand, sticking her tongue out at her husband as he teases her about some childhood nickname or other, when the wind shifts. And one minute, Christine is laughing and full of contentment and joy, and the next she is suddenly soberly aware that something dreadful has happened, even though she doesn’t quite know _what._

“Alan,” she begins, not knowing quite how to finish, but she doesn’t need to because at that very moment, there is a _screech_ from within the house _._ It’s unearthly in its rage and hurt and anguish, and as it echoes in the air for much longer than it really should echo, there is an incredible cacophony of noise as the world explodes in response to it – a shattering of everything, and then the world seems to fall silent.

Christine and Alan exchange horrified glances. Without another word, they _run –_ up the garden path and to the front door, as fast as they can – so fast that they barely have time to register that the windows of their house simply aren’t there any more. Alan wrenches the door open, and Christine pushes her way past him – and they both stop.

The house is dark and silent. All of the glass in the house is broken, and _incredibly_ so. Windows, mirrors, cups lightbulbs – detonated into millions of shining fractal shards that coat the entire house in a thin layer of deadly shining dust.

“Mel? Ana?” Christine calls, struggling to keep the rising hysteria out of her voice as she carefully makes her way through the shining darkness. “Girls, don’t move – just stay where you are, I don’t want you to hurt yourselves; we’ll come to you –”

There is a dreadful keening noise coming from the top of the staircase. To hell with the glass. Christine runs like the world is ending and gets there in record time and there she sees –

Ana, at the foot of the stairs. Ana, crumpled and bloody in her bright yellow polka-dot skirt, looking entirely too tiny and pale in the darkness, neck twisted at an angle that’s so fundamentally _wrong_ it makes the eyes water. Ana, unmoving.

The sound of choked, muffled noises of incomprehension, from the top of the stairs, and up there there’s another tiny figure hunched in on herself, shoulders trembling and hands pressed over her mouth, and eyes wide and cat-like and luminous.

“I didn’t,” Melanie croaks out, voice husky and hoarse from screaming, “I didn’t, I _didn’t,_ I _promise_ I didn’t –”

“Oh god,” is all Alan can say. “Melanie – Mel – ”

“The wind took her and, and – and it _pushed her_ and Ana’s just, she just, fell – I _didn’t,_ I wasn’t the one that pushed her – I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m _sorry,_ I’m,” she chokes back something that’s nothing like a sob and everything like grief that’s too large to escape her impossibly small body.

The fairy woman had promised one year before nature corrected the imbalance. They had gotten nearly four, but of course that wasn’t nearly enough.

*

For a couple of days, Melanie stays with Doctor Smythe from down the road, one of the few people who’s never been anything but kind to their family, who’d always stopped by every week or so with chocolate cake and outlandish, scarcely-believable stories about her younger years. 

Mum and Dad come over every day, and without fail and like clockwork tell her it’s not her fault, they still love her, they’re going to go home with her in just a few days, they only need to sort out a few things. She just nods and forces smiles and thinks about Ana and pretends not to notice every worried glance and unhappy little quirk of the mouth Doctor Smythe shoots in her direction.

There is a funeral she can’t remember much of except that Dad tells her very quietly that she’s going to have to stay in a side room for most of the service and they’ll come to get her afterwards, and she knows it’s because of what she did even though they tell her it’s not that.

And then she says goodbye and thank you to Doctor Smythe, who tells her to call her Evelyn and hugs her very gently like she’s afraid Melanie is going to shatter, and she goes home properly, and she and Mum and Dad start pretending everything back to normal except Anabel isn’t there and every time she goes into their room she swears she feels her heart stop beating even though that’s just not possible. But that’s okay, because Mum helps her move all her stuff into a new room and Dad helps her paint it in sunshine yellow and everything’s fine and everything’s normal, it’s fine, it really is.

But the thing is, it’s not like normal because all the bad luck is _gone._ Their milk doesn’t spoil and the birds in the yard don’t die and parts of the house aren’t breaking down mysteriously anymore. No more gas leaks, no more extravagant amounts of spiders. It would be a miracle if it weren’t so horribly obvious what the cost of this was.

Melanie is still too young to properly understand, but it doesn’t take understanding for her to know that she’d rather have her sister back any day, even if it meant every bad turn of fortune returning to them a thousand times worse.

*

School, when it happens, is a nightmare. It would have already been bad enough, being a changeling, but now with the entire town blaming Melanie for the death of her sister... _well_.

Melanie is smart. She is! She can remember everything she’s ever read, and that makes tests really easy, especially when it’s maths. Learning and tests and books aren’t the problem. It’s everyone else.

Here are some facts about Melanie: she likes bright flowers and computers are fascinating and her memory is perfect and she and her sister are inseparable except that isn’t quite right because she hasn’t seen her sister in years and she never will again and that’s all her fault. Iron makes her skin blister and sets her teeth on edge. She has an uncanny knack for predicting exactly what the weather’s going to be like on any given day. Her ears are pointed, which proves she isn’t human, and this is why everyone hates her.

In theory, she loves being around people, because everyone in the world is so bright and colorful and interesting and she knows she’d adore talking to them and hearing them talk about themselves, the way Doctor Smythe does whenever she comes over, but the problem is that _people_ don’t seem to feel the same way about her.

The other children turn their coats and jackets inside out so she can’t even get near to them without feeling sick and dizzy and miserable. They aren’t _supposed_ to do that. According to the school rules they aren’t supposed to bully but the teachers don’t stop them from doing it even when she tells them about it really politely, and she eats lunch alone day after day after day.

Melanie enters seventh grade. Some things get better, but not a lot of them do. Mostly, things just get worse.

Sometimes she sits out near the fence that separates the school from the rest of the world, and she eats her lunch there, and sometimes, just sometimes, a cat comes to join her. It’s a scruffy-looking brown cat, with bright hazel eyes and a slightly high-pitched meow, and it lies on the grass near her and doesn’t seem inclined to run away when she pulls out her books and reads to it.

It has no collar and no owner that she knows about, and it gets somewhat skittish when she tries to pet it, but it doesn’t seem scared of her, exactly. Which makes a lovely change. Most cats don’t even like her; something about changelings and wild animals and fairies, but this one seems strangely okay with her company.

A cat, no matter how tolerant, is no substitute for a real friend, though, and Doctor Smythe is really nice but she’s an adult, and Mum and Dad are wonderful but they’re her parents, and so Melanie is just really terribly lonely all the time and sometimes she wonders if this is what dying slowly feels like.

Backwards coats becomes crumbs of bread in their pockets making her nervous and antsy, and only a few weeks after that, just about everyone starts wearing iron – bracelets and necklaces and rings, displayed quite prominently and rather pointedly too. She keeps quiet about it, because it’s been pretty empirically proven by now that the teachers aren’t going to do anything, and her parents are dealing with enough already, and besides she’s strong and can take it. She can. She really can.

Even when it stops being passive-aggressive anti-fairy charms and starts getting horrifyingly physical.

Kick. Shove. Melanie’s on her knees and then on her back, hoping and praying that they’ll just give up and leave her alone, even though she knows it won’t do her any good.

“Go back to the forest, _fairy,_ ” snarls one girl who can’t be any older than she is. Melanie looks at her and then up at the sky and it’s so blue and perfect, and her vision jolts as someone kicks her again. She rolls over, bundling her too-big winter coat around herself as she curls into a ball.

“I don’t live in the forest,” she manages to gasp out. “I live in a house, with Mum and Dad and that’s where I belong and they don’t want to give me back because they _love_ me, please leave me alone – ”

“They don’t love you,” insists the girl. “They hate you! Hate you hate you _hate_ you.”

“They _don’t!_ ” Melanie shrills unhappily, trying to cover her ears with her hands. Someone grabs them and rips them away, and she tries not to scream. Things tend to break when she screams, and nobody is ever happy about that. “You’re being mean, and they _don’t_ hate me!”

“They do!”

“They don’t – ”

“You killed their daughter!” yells some older boy who she doesn’t know. “Of _course_ they hate you! Everyone else does!”

“No, I – ” Melanie starts and then her throat seizes up like she’s choking and she can’t say anything else, which they take as a cue to start laughing and jeering at her again. Melanie cannot lie; not even as a joke, not even if she wants to. Which means that she can’t say things that she doesn’t believe are true, either. Which means that all she can really do is curl up even tighter and wait for it to be over.

It’s several long, long minutes before the bell for the end of lunch rings and the hallways start to flood with people, all of her classmates scatter, leaving her crumpled on the floor in a sad little Melanie-shaped heap. She stays there and doesn’t move at all and nobody so much as prods her, not even once.

The start-of-class bell goes and the hallways are silent again, and she slowly starts to uncurl. Her head’s pounding and her face feels tight and achy. She wants to cry, but isn’t sure she remembers how to. Carefully, haltingly, she gets to her feet.

This is not the first time this has happened, but it’s the first time that her ribs have hurt quite this much afterwards, and it’s the first time it’s really started to dawn on her just how hopeless her entire situation is.

She thinks about telling Mum and Dad about it, because they can fix just about anything, from tables with wobbly legs to stuffed toys she pulled at a bit too hard, and if anyone can fix this and help her find friends, it’s going to be then. But then she thinks about their faces when they don’t think she’s paying attention, when they’re talking about her and they both look just so tired and exhausted and worried and – and they’re doing so much for her already. Everyone hates them already, they don’t need to deal with the _everyone_ that Melanie has to deal with hating them too. 

And then Melanie starts thinking about how she can take care of the problem herself, because she is a Bush and when a Bush sets their mind to something, there’s nothing that can stop them from getting it done. And in this situation where saying please and other nice things or talking to adult isn’t going to help, there’s only a few things she _can_ do. She’s not very strong or tall or really much of anything physically, so fighting’s out. If she had a strong friend maybe they could fight for her, but she doesn’t have one of those – she only has a cat who vaguely tolerates her presence, and that’s not very good for anything at all.

She _could_ talk them into leaving her alone. She can do that. She can _make_ them leave her alone, because when she gets especially mad or sad or any emotion really, a ball of something tingly and fresh-tasting wells up inside her, and when that happens sometimes things happen, like when she’d talked the scruffy brown cat into climbing onto her shoulders or when she’d made all the sunflowers out back grow extra tall, which is really nice. But she’s only accidentally used it on her parents once or twice and she doesn’t like anything about _that_ , and something about using it on anyone at all, no matter how mean and horrible they’re being to her makes her feel all gross and icky inside. So – no. Not that.

She doesn’t have any way to help herself.

She feels tears start to drip down her face because this is _dreadful_ and she’s too small to get anything at all done on her own, and the world’s just too big for her, and it’s going to be like this _forever_ and she’ll be alone and everyone will hate her and anyone else could leave the town and just find a better school but she has to be the _freak_ who’s tied to the forest and if she tries to go more than a kilometre out of town she starts feeling sick like she’s going to die and it’s not _fair_ because she wants to leave more than anything and now she’s crying and it’s like she’s never going to stop. She presses against the wall, sliding down it until she’s got her head buried in her hands and her chin on her knees.

“Be happy,” Melanie mutters to herself desperately, and feels the power seeping into it as she says it – the sort of heady electric feeling that scares her so much she can’t find words for it. Right now, she pushes past the fear and just tries to make what she’s saying reality. “ _Be happy,_ Melanie,” she repeats, gritting her teeth with tears spilling down her face, even though the feeling of sadness itself is fading like puddles in the sun. “No more crying, come on now, be _happy._ ”

She shivers as the words take hold, and as they do, she becomes aware of tentative footsteps tap-tap-tapping up the hallway behind her, and takes a moment to wipe away the last traces of tears from her cheeks with the sleeve of her jumper, before turning to meet the person.

“Uh, um – are you all right?” a boy with messy hair and a nervous expression asks – she thinks he’s in her grade, maybe in the other fourth-form class – hanging close to the wall. “Only, I saw a bunch of kids run away from here, and it looks like something’s got you pretty upset, so –”

“No,” she says. Her smile is radiant. Her eyes shine. Something inside her feels dull and empty, but that something is distant and she can easily ignore it. “No, I’m fine! Thank you for asking, but everything’s fine.”

“You look like you’ve been crying?” says the boy, sounding unsure and worried. He must not know about her, Melanie thinks, and the thought doesn’t hurt as much as it usually does. “Look, if you need to talk...”

“No. Everything’s fine,” she says again. “Everything’s perfect. I’ve never felt better.”

And of course, she can’t lie. So, really, it’s _got_ to be true.

**Author's Note:**

> Christine, Alan, and Anabel Bush are all from the DWEU, and Anabel's death is (unfortunately) canon - although I've changed around some other events for the purposes of the story/setting.
> 
> More to come, of course.


End file.
